08:33, FRIDAY AUGUST 27, LIMA (16:33/27-08-99 ZULU)
FORT QUICK INFIRMARY, SUNNYDALE
"Bu... why?" Willow finally managed.
Misha and Taz had drawn up chairs of their own, parking themselves at the foot of Willow's bed. It was Taz who answered her question, with a twisted smile: "'Wesley, go back to your Council and tell them, until the next Slayer comes along, they can close up shop. I'm not working for them anymore.'"
"Fine sentiments," Misha noted, then his voice turned rueful. "I've voiced them myself... but Buffy's saying them to the face of the Council's number-two hatchetman probably wasn't the best idea in history."
Hatchetm - Wesley!? Willow's first impulse was to break into hysterical laughter at the very idea... but the uniformed trio (most importantly Xander) were conspicuously not smiling. "You're serious."
"Not if I can help it," the yellow-eyed youth said levelly, "but in this case: damn straight." Seeing Giles' skeptical expression, he leaned back in his chair a little. "They needed to keep tabs on you lot, and none of you would've ever lowered your guard if he'd come on like Eliot Ness, so he played the overbred dandy instead... and he saw your real attitudes. Just like he hoped."
"Um... still with the 'why'," Willow pointed out, a little testily.
Misha sighed, trying to frame his thoughts properly. "You've always been told - and believed - that the Council exists to support the Slayer, right?" When she nodded, he shook his head sadly. "Once, maybe. But after the first couple of centuries, that attitude changed into one more to the effect that the Slayer exists to justify the Council's existence."
When the Wiccan gave him a baffled look, he sighed and went on, "The Council has power and position, Willow, and it has done since before Christianity was an officially recognised religion. Every member of the Council's senior leadership has grown up in an environment almost completely insulated from reality by eons of privilege and patronage, and their view of their supposed 'duties' is seen through those distorting prisms. As far as they're concerned, the shadow-world doesn't exist to be fought; it exists so they can live in posh houses and be waited on hand and foot. These people could care less about demons: what drives their every move is not living up to the Council's own ideals, or even fulfilling their responsibilities - but to protect their own little private empires and carve pieces off of everybody else's."
"I can't... entirely... accept that," Giles protested.
Misha cocked an eyebrow. "I'll admit there are exceptions... but they're few and far between. Most of the ruling cliques inside the Council are nothing less than a hereditary aristocracy. The award of every posting or position of any significance is decided not by who could perform that role best, but by whose great-great-forebear did this or that, or by who's trying to curry or return favours - or, occasionally, trying to dispose of someone who's just a little too inconvenient. Like you, Mister Giles."
"Me?"
"Didn't you ever wonder why they yanked you out of your little grotto in the depths of the Archives/Research service to make you a field-Watcher? Especially to an untrained Slayer with an attitude a mile wide who hadn't even read the friggin' Handbook? They sent you out here to die, Mister Giles; if Elliot Merrick got the chop in less than two months as Buffy Summers' Watcher, how long would you last in that post - especially atop a mystical nexus like Boca del Infierno?"
"Mister Giles, would you mind outlining the structure of the Watcher's Council - as you understand it?" Taz posed courteously.
Giles blinked at her, then took a moment to order his thoughts. "Of course. There are three main branches: Archives, Training and Security, each run by a Coordinator, and though they do communicate with each other a great deal in the course of their duties, in the course of normal events they're completely independent of each other. Each branch is broken down into two subsidiary services under a Sub-Coordinator. Archives/Research is the service I was in until I was assigned here: they handle interpretation and analysis of prophecies, mystical artifacts, and sundry other arcana, as well as being the, uh, the keepers of the Council's own institutional lore. Archives/Warehousing store those arcana and make sure they don't fall into the wrong hands. The responsibilities of Training/Watchers and Training/Slayers are self-explanatory. Security/Intelligence use whatever means they must to keep track of individuals of interest to us: Slayer candidates and their associates, and various, uh, 'movers and shakers' in the underworld, vampire sept-leaders, the more powerful demons, those who do business with them, and so forth. Security/Operations are the active arm of the Council: they're responsible for assigning and supporting field Watchers like myself, for policing the Council and the Slayers, and for, uh, 'retrieving' artifacts that prove too dangerous. The Coordinators and Sub-Coordinators of each service all hold seats on the Central Quorum, the Council's ruling body, where they answer to the Chairman."
"That's what they want you to think, Giles," Xander said gently. "Truth is, almost all roads run through Security/Operations - they call it 'Mentor' for short, makes 'em sound more warm and fuzzy than they are. Sec/Int and Sec/Ops were always intimate out of necessity, and these days they're separate only on paper. Mentor's powers to police the Council mean they control both sides of Training to make sure the people they 'educate' have been properly indoctrinated. The nature of the gear Archives/Warehousing looks after makes them a security concern, too. They haven't touched Archives/Research, mainly because most of those people have their noses too deep in a book to cause any real problems.
"So instead of being first among equals, Mentor has been the man behind the throne to every Council Chairman in the last few hundred years. Anyone who threatens their control is squashed: with blackmail, with extortion, even with one-way assignments or outright assassination.
"The problem is, while almost everyone inside the inner circle knows that, everyone outside thinks that the Council is all about sweetness and light and looking out for the human race - not number one. And the entire key to the Council's political legitimacy, hell, to its whole existence, is the Slayer. As long as the Council is associated with the Slayer - or controls her, as has become the case in recent centuries - they're perceived to be the good guys and deserve to be in charge; but if the Slayer ever left the Council, its entire raison d'être would go with her.
"Buffy told the Council to go to hell, in almost as many words. If they lose their ties to the Slayer, they lose everything they've built for themselves in the last two thousand years. The Council knows where the next Slayer is coming from." Xander smiled thinly. "Hell, Willow: you do the maths."
"That's... that's...."
"Cynical? Self-centred? Amoral?" Misha suggested, with that crooked grin of his. "'What is a lifetime politician, Alex?'"
"And Misha Bleddyn picks up a thousand points," Xander smirked.
"They're a Watcher's KGB, Willow - and I *do* use the comparison advisedly." Taz's gaze dropped to the end of Willow's bed, her thoughts fifteen years and several thousand miles away for a long moment, then shook herself back to the here and now.
Misha squeezed her shoulder gently. "Your recent attackers were from Mentor's quote-unquote élite SHRIKE-Teams - the name actually comes from Slayer Hazard STRIKE, but given their clumsy, indiscriminate and unnecessarily brutal approach to things, it's also pretty appropriate in itself. They're the worst of Mentor's goons, most of them recruited from the dregs of the military and intelligence communities specifically for their lack of moral qualms, then rendered loyal to Mentor through magic."
Xander grinned suddenly. "Those tattoos you found, Wills - and, by the way, really nice work - they're the active component of a spell that twists the bearer's original ideology and loyalties to serve the caster's end. In this case, Mentor."
When Misha spoke again, it was with an acid layer of contempt. "Thing is, they can't come right out and kill the Slayer in front of the entire Council - if they openly act against the very person they're supposed to be supporting, it'd spark a revolution faster than the Boston Tea Party ever did - so over the centuries, they've cloaked their self-serving assassinations with a series of pretexts and covers and illusions. They set down a rigid code of conduct for the Slayer and made any infraction punishable by death... though cloaked in mealy-mouthed 'public-good' rhetoric. Slayer's quit the Council? She's a mutinous, super-powered vigilante: unacceptable risk to the public, kill her. Slayer's killed a human being, accidentally or otherwise? Superpowered vigilante, public menace, kill her. Slayer's helped a vampire? She's gone over to the other side, public menace, kill her. They never kill a Slayer to serve their own ends, you see; they do it to protect the public."
"They were the ones who instituted the Cruciamentum test, too," Xander offered. "Classic Catch-22. If the Slayer survived, the Council hadn't trained all the creativity and independence out of her; she could go rogue, better keep a closer eye on her. If she bought it, they'd trained her into an automaton, they'd done their job right: aw, too bad, next please!"
"Of course, the excuses for issuing an Edict of Execution were for the consumption of front-line Watchers only if they found out that the Slayer had been 'disciplined' in the first place. To prevent that, they've gone to elaborate lengths to cover their tracks. I've lost count of all the recorded instances of Watchers with Mentor loyalties knowingly sending their Slayers into death-traps, but if that doesn't work or isn't feasible, they make it look like a 'natural' environmental hazard. Susana Bocanegra, São Paolo, October '88: she was training street-kids so they could fight back when the Ordo Astra's private army made slave-raids. They fed her to a school of pirahna... fully conscious. Jemila al-Farooq, Cairo, February '92; she waited to stake a vampire until after it finishing eating a known child-molester. Mentor set off a carbomb in front of her apartment building that brought half the place down and killed a hundred and seventy nine people, Jemila among them; it was blamed on terrorists. Tatyana Zyrianova and Peter McKellar, December '95; officially, gunned down by the Triads as retaliation against Cerian McKellar for some noses she'd put out of joint during her last trip to Hong Kong." Misha snorted. "Yeah, right."
Willow looked back and forth between the two New Zealanders. "Uh...?"
"Our main enemy in Napier was the Ordo Astra vampire sept," Taz supplied. "They owned - and still own - a corporation called the Templar Trading Group" (Willow blinked) "which, in turn, owned a 'security' company called Stormhawk Security Forces. The Stormers ran Napier like they were an occupying army; hell, TTG practically owned the entire country. Apart from their legitimate businesses, the Astra are into almost anything you care to think of: drugs, standover rackets with their 'security forces', the fouler forms of slavery, talislegging -"
"Talislegging?" Willow frowned.
"The shadow-market trade in mystical artifacts and arcana," Misha explained. "And one of their main sources of supply? Mentor. They've been pilfering Archives/Warehousing to fund their operations for centuries. We'd been playing run-and-gun with the Astra and their gunsels for better than two years when we stumbled across their cozy little arrangement with Mentor... who promptly decided to squash us for it.
"Thankfully, we had a little forewarning, and we actually managed to turn it back on them - used our 'assassination' to slip a fifth-columnist into their good graces."
"How?" Giles asked.
"Believe it or not? Quentin Travers and some of his mob." Misha quashed a smile at their goggle-eyed looks. "Look, Travers may well be a sanctimonious, hidebound, reactionary old dinosaur -"
"Not to mention a prick of the first order," Taz added feelingly.
Misha coughed a laugh and pressed on. "- but in his own way, he's loyal to the Council's ideals. Despite his post as Sub-Coordinator (Training/Slayers), he's about the only person in the Council who isn't under Mentor's thumb - and that's only because he acts like he already is anyway, to curry favour.
"We had a very public 'falling out' with our Watcher of the time, and of course Mentor snapped them up. That agent-in-place, 'Colt', has been accepted into their very top echelon, and they've given us Mentor's entire network: the name, address, posting, and complete biography and work-history of every Mentor member, shooter, mole, double-agent and informant across the whole of Europe - they're not really strong in the Americas or Asia, for some reason.
"But more to the point, Colt has given us the exact strength, dispositions and intentions of the SHRIKE-teams here in Sunnydale."
"With a couple of exceptions," Xander noted pointedly. Jesus, if Agate had been even a little more on the ball - or if Ruby had been a little luckier -!
Misha shot him a steady look. "We've already had that conversation, Snoopy." Taking a breath to put himself back on track, he looked back to their guests. "There were eighteen of them, counting the would-be robbers, the people who shot up Mister Giles' flat, and the team last night. After the smoke cleared this morning, they're down to five, one of whom works for us... and has them convinced that you, Willow, are in the hands of Team-One, along with Snoopy and the two of us. Their current plans - which they have no reason to change, thanks to Colt's maskirovka - call for them to haul the two of you in to meet up with Buffy at Sunnydale High School gym on Sunday night, execute the lot of you, and burn the whole place down to make it look like she repeated her final act at Hemery and took you two with her.
"Most of the SHRIKEs are sitting tight at a safehouse just outside town, so theoretically we could sweep them all up tonight... but there's a complication. One of them's virtually living in Buffy's pocket, and if that one gets even the vaguest hint of trouble, the last thing to ever go through Buffy's mind will be a bullet. Possibly the first thing, too, come to think of it," he added sourly. "So we're going to let them think everything's going their way and show them exactly what they expect to see... until Sunday night, when we shove their preconceptions right down their throat."
"How?" Giles asked.
Misha smiled thinly and explained for a couple of minutes. The plan/scam he outlined exploited their opponent's mental blind-spots and arrogance to the fullest, and showed that as quiet and unassuming as he might seem, he had a first-rate grasp of tactics, the keenest appreciation for the need for surprise and 'maskirovka' (deceptive operations)... and a ruthless streak a metre wide.
When he was done, Willow shook her head. "I almost prefer the hummus offensive," she murmured. "That's... that's.... I mean, I've seen you guys work, you guys can pull it off, sure, but that plan...."
"What? Features Xander in a crucial role?" Taz asked, her tone a little harsh.
"Well... yes," Giles nodded. "And as much affection as I may have for Xander, I doubt -"
"Mister Giles, you're thinking of the Xander Harris who left Sunnydale six weeks ago. Y'know: the one you lot considered nothing more than an errand-runner and whipping-boy because he has no supernatural 'gifts'?" Misha's voice was cold and hard, a scalpel that peeled the skin from the Scoobies one strip at a time. "The Xander Harris we're thinking of is the one that I watched kill an Arulcan bloodcat with a knife."
Xander shifted uncomfortably as Giles arched a brow. "'Bloodcat'?"
"Think of the biggest fuck-off man-eating Bengal tiger you ever heard of, feed it steroids for a year, then fire it from the US Post Office," Taz said baldly.
"My word!" the Englishman murmured, staring at the young man in question with something approaching awe. "And you killed one of those with a knife?"
"Seemed like the thing to do at the time," Xander shrugged, manifestly uncomfortable with this sort of attention.
"'Sides which, it'd already had his rifle for an entrée and was eyeing Taz up as the main course," Misha added.
Willow gave them a dubious look. "Uhhh... when was this?"
"'Bout four months ago," Taz shrugged.
"???" the Wiccan gaped. "How can that - but he only left here at the start of July!"
"And promptly got so lost he wound up in September, 1992," Misha countered blandly.
"... huh!?"
{That was my doing.} All five heads whipped around as a massive individual appeared in the middle of the room, turning back into phase with reality. His 'voice' was a deep rumble, fit to shake the very earth - yet his lips didn't move. He was as he'd appeared to Buffy: a black man about seven feet tall, wall-to-wall muscle, with shoulder-length hair and yellow eyes - with red slit pupils.
Misha nodded in greeting; his voice just a little too neutral. "Toa."
- * - * - * - * - * - * - * -
08:41, AUGUST 27, LIMA (16:41/27-08-99 ZULU)
SUMMERS RESIDENCE
Buffy stared down at the pentagram necklace in her hand through a thin red veil of blood-fury. These people couldn't possibly know what they were doing, messing with a Slayer like this, but when she caught up with them, she'd -!
"Buffy."
Her head whipped around. Oz had unlimbered Willow's laptop to try a few things, and now he'd pushed the eyephones up onto his forehead. "Got something?" she asked hopefully.
He shook his head. "Calm down, hmm?"
"'Calm down'? Well, excuse me for actually caring about my friends! Not all of us can be Prozac Poster-People!" she snapped, resuming her pacing. "I mean, what the hell are they thinking? Who the hell are they!?"
"Whoever they are, they'll contact us when they're ready, Buffy," Cerian said levelly. "This is exactly why they're waiting so long: they want you to work yourself into a lather, so when they do make contact, you'll be so wound-up - or exhausted - that you can't think clearly or react coherently. Overwrought people make mistakes, Buffy, and under exactly the circumstances when they can't be afforded."
"How do you know what they're thinking?"
The Welshwoman cocked an eyebrow at her, looking very Giles-esque for a moment. "I'm an anthropologist, Buffy; anthropology is nothing more or less than the study of human behaviour, its hows and whys. Besides wearing us all down so we make mistakes, this sort of delay is little more than a reminder that in this situation, they have the power. And your 'freaking out' is giving them exactly what they want."
Joyce had come in as Cerian was speaking, bearing a tray of steaming pancakes and maple syrup and glasses of Gatorade that she set on the coffee-table. "She's right, honey. We're all worried, but getting upset isn't going to help. Now please, eat. I'm gonna go change for the funeral."
"Funeral?" Buffy blinked, drawing a blank.
"At ten o'clock. The one for Jeff Rance?" the senior Summers prodded. "The security guard who was killed Monday? I owe it to him and his family to be there, Buffy; I employed him, and that makes me at least a little responsible for his death."
"And give these... whoevers a chance to grab you too?" the Slayer countered, and for his own part, Oz was a little unnerved by the hint of shrill panic in her voice. "Nuh-uh. We're coming too."
"Not without breakfast you're not."
Buffy tried to stand her ground for a moment longer... but as tough as a Slayer might be, there was one thing she had no chance of defeating: the force of Nature known as Mom. She let a sigh, subsiding and turning towards the table and the tray thereon. "Okay. Fine. You win; we'll eat, then we'll go. I'm not letting any of you guys out of my sight right now."
- * - * - * - * - * - * - * -
08:43, AUGUST 27, LIMA (16:43/27-08-99 ZULU)
FORT QUICK INFIRMARY
Both Giles and Willow had dabbled with magic, and they knew Power when they saw/felt it. Giles simply stared at this 'Toa' with a pale face and wide eyes. Though her own ability to feel and channel mystical energies was yet very limited, Willow reeled a little, bracing herself on the bed as she felt the magic in the newcomer; it simply roiled off him, it was all primal and raw and elemental, it weighed on her tongue like sweet, clear water and on her skin like the near-pain of driving rain and on her ears like a continuous roar of thunder and it made her feel all tiny and insignificant and terrified and energised and alive and real -!
"Tone it down, Toa," Misha said, his voice still completely uninflected. "Now."
The... being didn't react to that in words, but suddenly that feeling of Power faded from Willow's senses. She put a hand to her head, feeling as giddy as if she'd just stepped off a rollercoaster; her whole body was tingling and -
Whoa! She held up her bruised hand, marvelling as actinic sparks and arcs of raw magic danced across her skin, running up her fingers like they were Jacob's ladders, flickering across her bruises and scrapes. Even as she watched, the skin flowed together and knitted, the swelling subsided and vanished, the bruises faded from purple to brown to yellow to nothing. All the while, all her other aches and pains were dissolving away, too. Oh, wow!
"Convenient timing," Taz observed coolly. Willow looked back to her... and went a little wild-eyed.
Her eyes were reflecting yellow-green, just like a wolf's. Just like Misha's had the previous night.
Just like Toa's were now.
{Time is neither convenient nor inconvenient, mortal; time is.}
"Save the platitudes and do what you're here to do, okay?"
"Who - what -?" Giles began.
{Your friend Buffy has told you of Whistler?} Toa asked. When Willow nodded, still a little dazed, he - it - shrugged. {I'm with them: same people, different department.}
Seeing Willow frown, Misha told her kindly, "That's all we could get out of him, too - and we've known him five years."
'Toa' gave them a glance and crossed to where Faith lay, touching her forehead. {Her physical injuries I can heal, but the rest -}
"Is our problem, not yours."
Toa nodded, and suddenly Willow could feel Power swirling past her, spiralling in towards him like an invisible tornado and building like a thunderhead. He touched Faith's lips, parting them a millimetre or two, then raised his left arm over the comatose Dark Slayer and poised his wrist over her lips -
What the heck is this? flew across the Wiccan's mind.
- his right forefinger morphed into a talon that slashed open the poised wrist.
Even as she and Giles gasped in astonishment, a single drop of blood, iridescent with all colours and with none, gathered at the centre of the wound, fell free, landed in Faith's slightly-open mouth. A second. A third. And all the while, the Power around the pair built and built and built -
Toa rested his hand on Faith's forehead, drew a deep breath -
Willow gasped as the gathered mystical energy ran through the big black 'man' into the fallen Slayer. Spillover Power hammered into the redhead like a tidal wave, and for a moment, every colour she could see was blindingly vivid -
{It is done.} Toa's hand returned to 'normal', and he waved it at his cut, which vanished as if it had never been. He turned to look at Taz and Misha. {I have paid my debt to your group; I have paid my debt to you, Slayer; I have paid my debt to you, Defender; I have now paid my debt to your companion. My obligation to all of you is ended. From here on, a favour asked will be a favour sought.}
"When will she wake up?" Misha asked.
Toa shrugged. {She will wake when she wakes. That is her choice, which I cannot interfere with.} He paused, then cocked his head a little. {I leave you with this: beware. Mine is not the only Life Magic being worked in this area; nor is the other worker using their skill so wisely.}
With that, he turned sideways to reality and was gone.
Xander massaged his neck, trying to get his hackles to lie down again. "Jeesh. He certainly believes in making his Presence felt."
"Mmm." Misha turned back to Giles and Willow. "You jokers okay?"
Willow still had a hand to her forehead. "Whoa. Wh-what was that?"
"From things Cerian said, he's an Archon - or was," Xander amended. "The way I hear it, he got canned for overstepping his limits - they stripped him of most of his powers."
That was after he'd lost most of his power!? she thought dizzily, feeling the sensation begin to ebb. She didn't hurt anywhere anymore, and something told her that all her bruises and scrapes were just gone as if they'd never been.
"And he owed us. You've seen our eyes? That's about the only outward sign of the, uh, legacy left by the ritual he just performed on Faith." Misha ran his hand over his scarred arm. "Without his attentions, this would have killed or crippled me. As it stands, I've been left with certain enhancements compared to the normal human. My sensory acuity is significantly improved, as well as my kinesthetic sense and what you might call my 'sixth sense'; I heal at a vastly improved rate, though not to the same degree as a Slayer; my neural impulses travel about ten percent faster than those of a normal human of the same age and training, meaning improved reflexes and coordination; and my system scavenges out fatigue-toxins with greater efficiency than normal, which makes for improved stamina and alertness for extended periods."
"Toa owed the two of us, and 'Colt', as individuals, and the three of us as a group. I called in my favour to save Misha's life when he was burned," Taz amplified. "He used his marker to save me when Mentor shot us four years ago, and what you just saw was Colt's call on Toa's honour. But Toa's enhancements and the Slayer Gifts can't co-exist in the same person, so my Slayer 'powers' were stripped away."
"And went to Saint Buffy," Misha muttered sourly.
What's his problem? Willow wondered in passing. "So, Faith's -"
"There'll be a new Slayer in a month or so," Xander nodded. "Faith will lose most of her powers - the strength, the speed and reflexes, the mystical fighting instincts, the super-healing - but the 'enhancements' will replace most of them, if at a lower degree. On the other hand, she'll need a lot of training and therapy to get back into fighting trim when she wakes up, and time to figure out how to handle her new capabilities."
"All the Slayer fighting skills will evapourate; her own experience won't. I know that first-hand," Taz smiled thinly, giving her sister-(ex-)Slayer a sympathetic look. "She's been surviving on the streets since she was twelve; she knows how to fight. She'll be fine."
Willow blinked at her. "You make that sound like a good thing!"
Xander snapped his mouth shut before he could say anything. Misha flushed an angry scarlet and looked away, taking a deep breath.
Taz turned hard eyes on the Wiccan. "That's a discussion for another time," she said, her accent thick.
"Speaking of, uh, 'other times': I believe you were describing how Xander seems to have been in two places at once four months ago?" Giles inserted carefully.
Taz looked back to the Watcher and visibly swallowed her ire... at least for now. "We rescued him from a couple of Mentors outside DC six weeks ago and explained things to him. Being that he is who he is, his only question was 'where do I sign up'?" She gave that sentence a certain degree of emphasis. "His heart was in it, but frankly his technical skills weren't up to the job and we didn't have the time to correct that... until we remembered Toa and called in the collective favour he owed me, Misha and Colt. We laid out the options to Xander, and he elected to go to Lympstone."
"Lympstone?" Willow repeated blankly.
Giles wasn't so uninformed. "The Royal Marines!?"
"The very same," Taz nodded. "Toa sent him back to them to... September 1992, complete with a false identity as 'Harrison Sanders' and cover as a US Marine sent to the bootnecks as an experiment, measuring the relative results of the two basic-training programmes.
"Y'see, most other training programmes melt a recruit down and pour him into a mould." Taz snorted. "It seems to work, more or less, but it was completely unsuitable for our purposes and for Snoopy: none of you would have recognised him if he'd turned up as a brain-washed automaton. Royal Marine training is a matter of turning the screw week by week, encouraging a man to find and improve himself, kind of like a high-pressure education. It's time-consuming, of course, but the end result is worthwhile: every man who comes out of Lympstone wearing a green beret is distilled down to himself - and he's a member of an élite that knows few equals and only a couple of superiors." She smiled wryly at that, touching her own sandy beret thoughtfully.
"'Superiors', my arse," Xander sniffed, his voice lapsing even further into those British intonations even as he squirmed, a little uncomfortable with all the attention being directed his way... all over actions that were no more or less than what he'd needed to do. "Since when are the 'Sports And Social' 'superior'?"
"Let's table that issue for now," Misha suggested quickly, seeing the familiar challenging glint in his wife's eyes. This is not the time for an SAS/RM argument! "In any case, once he was finished at Lympstone - which took longer than usual, since he showed a truly impressive talent for busting himself up on the physical side of things - he went through parachute qualification and Small Craft Branch and got posted to 3 Raiding Squadron in Hong Kong, an anti-smuggling patrol unit. About three months after he got there, he 'disappeared' and Toa dropped him in our laps... last November."
"After we sorted out who he was, which was kind of a production," Taz explained with a roll of her eyes, "we dropped him right into our training programme. It's even more high-intensity than Lympstone - which isn't really surprising, since my uncle designed it, based on the ones he's spent thirty years running for the NZSAS - and for all that he was a trained, experienced Royal Marine, he spent a lot of time bleeding and sweating and learning a lot of new stuff.
"He trained and worked with us from the start of November until the end of April, learning all sorts of fun stuff - martial arts and close combat, tactics and fieldcraft, parazoology, specialist training as a battlefield medic, various other esoterica - and deployed on some missions with us for practical experience, which is how he got that bloodcat-skin rug for his living room. When we got back from that caper, he took some personal time to stay out of his own way, traveled the world, met interesting people and killed a few of 'em, that sort of thing. We met up in Vegas about nine weeks ago - the two of us were doing product-eval on a new UAV for the manufacturers and the Marines - and he filled in the last details we needed to take care of this little problem, then spent most of the rest of his time trying to bankrupt the casinos before he came back here. And did a fair job of it, from what I hear.
"So, Mister Giles, Willow, if you have any concerns about Snoopy's competence, forget 'em. There are five shooters in the world that I trust without question." Taz gave them both an unyielding look. "Three of them are sitting in this room wearing Nga Kehua uniform."
- * - * - * - * - * - * - * -
Giles looked back and forth between the trio of young soldiers(?), assessing their manners. Xander was blushing a little, clearly uncomfortable with being praised so highly... but none of them was backing off.
"I see," the former librarian said eventually. "Might I ask what this... 'Nga Kehua' might be?"
"The name means 'The Ghosts'. It's what the goblins call the strike-teams fielded by the New Zealand Paranatural Defence Service," Misha explained easily, "though in all honesty, 'service' might be stretching the point a little. We're a very small and very 'black' organisation - that means we don't officially exist, and our government funding is washed through other sources - dedicated to fighting this shadow-war Taz and I blundered into six years ago. Our support crews include all sorts of analysts and intelligence types, and we've got several paramilitary strike teams, most of whom are military or military-trained; Taz and I, for example, are technically civilians, since we never joined the Army, but we've completed NZSAS training and are accepted as members of the Squadron. Taz's uncle Andrushka handles their training like he did ours when we were younger, and since he's been operating with the NZSAS in various capacities for almost forty years, by the time he's done with the recruits - no matter if they were SAS, police, or just some really determined volunteer civilian like Taz or myself - they know the job. A lot of our people are just attack survivors who're determined to do whatever they can to help, even less qualified to do this job than Snoopy here used to be... but, unlike some," he added significantly, giving his guests a look that matched the one Taz had handed out a moment ago, "we don't believe in turning away those who want to do their part."
"That's neither here nor there," Xander inserted quickly.
"Really?" The New Zealander sounded far from convinced, but didn't push the point. For now.
"So what happens now?" Giles asked.
Taz shrugged. "Now, you and Willow sit tight here until Monday morning. The surviving SHRIKEs don't even know you're still alive, and even if they did, they wouldn't think to look for you here. After we kill the Council's assassins on Sunday night, we'll go back to training a Nga Kehua-style operation among the SPD and MFR troops, and you'll be able to go back to business as usual."
"I rather doubt that," the Watcher said gently. "Once they realise they've failed, Mentor will assemble more assassins and try again."
Taz gave him a flat look. "Do we look that stupid, Mister Giles? Of course they'd try again - that's why they're never gonna get the chance!"
"I'm sorry? I'm afraid I don't follow you."
"The Slayer's conduct is no longer a matter of concern to Mentor, Giles, because in about... thirty-four hours," Xander said, consulting the inward-turned face of his watch, "there will no longer be a Mentor."
Giles went stark white.
Taz nodded soberly. "Colt's information is very complete, sir. And right now, assault teams from several special-operations forces, including the SAS, Royal Marines, and the British Paranatural Defence Service, are staging to remove every last Mentor inside the Council. Come Sunday night, when they think they're going to take out Buffy, we are going to put them out of business. All of them.
"And the Council's going to need cleaning up afterwards," she added. "With that many key people ripped out of their infrastructure, someone will have to take over and turn the Council into something that actually works - and remembers its responsibilities."
Giles raised a querying eyebrow. "Do you have a particular 'someone' in mind?"
"I should imagine Travers does," Misha murmured blandly.
"To which I can only say 'pride goeth'," Xander added with a smirk. None of the three paramilitary types had any illusions about Travers' real motives or ends... or any sympathy for what the Fates really had in store for him.
Taz gave them both a look and shrugged to Giles. "Look, what happens after we're done is an internal matter. We're soldiers; we just break stuff. That said, Colt's compiled a list of suitable candidates. One of the benefits of being in charge of monitoring malcontents is that you know exactly who to go to when you're setting up a coup," she grinned crookedly.
"Right." Giles leaned back to digest all this. "Might I ask how you set all this up? The external forces, I mean?"
Taz touched the sandy beret under her epaulette. "Mentor didn't do their homework about the two of us. My uncle Andrushka lives under a false identity as Andrew O'Ryan, who's just a harmless longshoreman. His real name is Andrew Hazelton, and he spent twenty years in the NZSAS under that name - he's still an instructor, works with our SAS and the NZPDS, Force Recon and FBI HRT at Quantico, people like that - and he likes to keep his hand in with actual field-operations. He also has a lot of friends in low places in the special-operations community, a network with fellow 'retirees', what-have-you."
"And what will you do with your prisoners?"
Misha gave him a blank look. "I'm sorry: 'prisoners'?"
Chapter End Notes:
'arcana' - slang for knowledge; in this context, tomes or goods of mystical significance. A term borrowed from Shadowrun. :D
The shrike is a member of the hawk family of birds; its hunting methods involve impaling its prey on cruel thorns, which trap and weaken it to be eaten at leisure.
'shadow-market' - like the outright 'black' market, but not quite as shady. Another Shadowrun term, as is 'talis-legging' itself.
'standover rackets' - extortion or protection scams.
'Arulco' is the fictional Latin American nation-state that forms the setting for the computer RPG/strategy-game Jagged Alliance 2. The player's teams (comprised of both paid mercenaries and idealistic volunteers) help conduct a revolution against a corrupt dictatorial regime. The story of the team's time in Arulco is currently another WIP (not yet posted), but details only part of the campaign (though it deals with certain other concerns that TalonSoft glossed over for ease of gameplay).
'Bloodcats' are predators found only in Arulco, and eliminating their danger to the civilian populace is one of the 'quests' players can fulfill to win the all-important support of said populace. It's not quite as easy as it sounds, since not only are bloodcats fully as nasty as Taz describes, they're also pack-hunters with the intelligence, cunning, and coordinated tactics of velociraptor. If you miss an attacking bloodcat with the first shot, you'll be too busy picking up your entrails to take another. :-S
'Jacob's ladders' - those towers of electrical coils with arcs of lightning playing up between them that were standard-issue for a mad scientist's lab up until the '60s. :-J
'kinesthetic sense' - what a fighter pilot would call 'situation awareness'; the ability to know where you are in a given space, and where everything else in that space is in relation to you, and what's happening in those surroundings. A crucial ability for close-combat.
'Goblins' - slang coined by Taz during her early days as Slayer, now semi-official Nga Kehua parlance for the various breeds of 'shadow-world' beasties: vampires, demons, and other paranatural creatures.
The Special Air Service is perhaps the world's finest and best-known special operations service, formed during World War Two by Lieutenant (later Colonel) David Stirling. They have two areas of speciality: long-range, deep-strike reconnaissance and sabotage (the 'green' role, referring to the usual uniform on these missions) and counter-terrorism (the 'black' role). Despite a recent wave of publicity sparked by the glory-hunting antics of certain members of the British SAS who need to fall under Challenger-2 tanks at the first opportunity :-D, their creed is one of quiet professionalism and discretion. Fairly solid rumour has it that Delta Force, the American Army's most élite SF formation, is trained by the British SAS... but doesn't listen as well as it should. (Whether this practice continued with 'The Unit' that succeeded Delta is unknown to me, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't.)
The New Zealand SAS is only one squadron (company) in authorised strength, plus another in Territorials... but according to some sources, they have a lot of members who don't appear on the books. ;-)
'Sports and Social' - a derisive nickname for the SAS used by the other British military services, playing off its initials. Xander's remark stems from the usual semi-friendly rivalry between military units; each has its own esprit de corps and a sense that they're the best at what they do, and others' claims of superiority are usually taken with a certain amused disdain. Arguments over who's really the best can get quite spirited.... ;-J
Small Craft Branch - the Royal Marine training unit at Poole, which as the name implies teaches its students how to handle 'small craft', mainly landing-boats and smaller boats like Rigid Raiders.
3 Raiding Squadron, up until Hong Kong's return to the control of mainland China, was responsible for curbing the efforts of smugglers who tried to get anything they could into Hong Kong, usually people looking for jobs. Though it wasn't an especially dangerous assignment in real-life - the smugglers didn't often resist when caught - in my altered history (and this being the Buffy-verse), it could get rather exciting.
The passing reference to the 'British Paranatural Defence Service' is a nod to a 1998 sci-fi miniseries called Ultraviolet, which dealt with the efforts of a covert British government/Catholic Church-funded organisation that sought to foil a vampiric conspiracy to take over society. The show was well-plotted, darkly atmospheric, and not a little morally ambiguous... and first-class drama all the way. Interestingly, not once in any of the six episodes were they ever actually referred to as 'vampires'; instead, they were 'Code 5s' (as in 'V'), or 'leeches' in the casual pejorative.
- As an aside, no name was ever given for the task-force in Ultraviolet canon; the UKPDS label is my own invention. At one point in the first episode of Ultraviolet, they present themselves as 'CIB' while investigating a possibly corrupt (and now vampiric) police officer; this is merely local colour, as CIB is to British police-officers what 'Internal Affairs' is to American ones.
- There's also a movie by the name Ultraviolet, but I can't in good conscience recommend watching it unless you're at least half-hammered. Trust me: if you watch that movie, your brain will be grateful for the blessed numbness of partial inebriation. x.x